Ceramic strain gages are being developed to monitor the structural integrity of gas turbine engine components employed in aerospace propulsion and power generation systems. The hot sections of these engines are exposed to gas temperatures in excess of 1500° C. Temperature gradients from the turbine blade tip to the root of the blade can be as large as 450° C. Thus, strain measurement under these conditions using resistance strain gages can lead to considerable error due to apparent strain effects, including thermal expansion coefficient mismatch between the gage and substrate as well as the temperature coefficient of resistance or TCR. Therefore, apparent strain effects are particularly troublesome when the active strain gage elements have an inherently large temperature coefficient of resistance. Apparent strain effects in resistance strain gages can be mitigated by employing strain gages that have a similar thermal expansion to the substrate and a smaller temperature coefficient of resistance, but the choices are much more limited when going to higher temperatures, since the piezoreisistive response and chemical and electrical stability become more important under these conditions. However, given that the materials comprising high temperature strain gage element such as indium tin oxide (ITO), have an inherently large temperature coefficient of resistance (See FIG. 1), the choices for temperature compensation are limited to placing reisistors or other gage elements in series with the active strain element as taught by O. J. Gregory and Q. Luo. Sensors and Actuators A; Physical Sensors, vol. 88, pp. 234-240 (2001), since most metals typically exhibit positive TCR's while most semiconductors exhibit negative TCR's, or using signal conditioning protocols that subtract out the contribution of thermal strain from the total strain to yield the mechanical strain; i.e. if the TCR is well characterized, this portion of the signal can be subtracted from total signal to give an approximate measurement due to mechanical loading.